Pretty crazy term. When people say that a startup takes over your life, they’re probably speaking from experience. Working at Daylun was a chaotic time. From the start we were already behind our deadlines and had to do a massive scramble just to get something working for the investor meeting in 6 weeks time. I learned that I really love having that type of ownership and will be pursing it in future roles.
Outside of work, I got into a good groove with my rock climbing and studied for the course I was taking, CS348 (Databases). I had to commute up to Waterloo a couple times for exams and demos, but the flexibility of remote work helped me achieve that. I also visited San Fransisco for the first time and built Contextualize!
What I Did
- Encoded a massive stack of old internal documents into GCP BigQuery to support the next point
- Deployed an internal RAG chatbot to speed up the onboarding of the team, using BigQuery as context
- Worked on programming factory simulations for demo purposes + to automate data generation
- Demo’d products at investor meetings + recruited the next term’s interns; wearing many hats!
What I Learned
- Deploying a model is pretty difficult, even if GCP is helping you along the way
- Startups are scrappy but you have so much autonomy, you can just do things
- The construction industry is an untapped market of machine learning, likely because the margin of error is razor thin.
- It’s about the friends you make along the way